托尼莫里森致辞诺贝尔文学奖.docx

托尼·莫里森 诺贝尔奖致辞?Autumn 1998 (6.3)Pages 46-50?The Bird in Our Hand: Is It Living or Dead?Toni Morrisons Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech1993Toni Morrison, American writerand 1993 Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature. Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (1997).Morrisons speech was delivered in Stockholm on December 7, 1993. An audio version of the speech read by the author herself is available from Random House Audio (RH 348). A hardbound print version is available from Alfred A. Knopf (ISBN 0-679-43437-2).For more information about the Nobel Prizes, visit the official Nobel Committee site in Sweden at www.nobel.se. A mirrored site is located in San Diego (USA) at . In commemoration of a Century of Nobel Prizes, an Electronic Nobel Museum will be inaugurated in 2001. Global, open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, this flexible, cost efficient Museum using the medium of the Internet will be just one more legacy of some of that oil that was produced at the turn of last century in Baku.Once upon a time . . .Members of the Swedish Academy, ladies and gentlemen, narrative has never been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge. I hope you will understand then why I begin these remarks with the opening phrase of what must be the oldest sentence in the world and the earliest one we remember from childhood, Once upon a time.Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise. Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise.In the version I know, the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question.Among her people, she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to plac